THE ROAD TO CANTERBURY

PILGRIMAGE, SAINTS AND POPULAR RELIGION

PILGRIMAGE

Pilgrimage Sites linked to Christianity´seminal figures

Cult of the saints and their relics
Keeping alive the memory of saints
Prilgirms enjoyed special status in medieval society
MOTIVES FOR GOING ON PILGRIMAGE

Desire to receive healing for physical affliction

Penitence
Having fun and feeling free of restraints
PILGRIMAGE EXPERIENCE

It is dualistic: Focused on this world and the next

Way of salvation, spiritual
Though might be undercut by the temptation to make the
journey´s pleasures the priority
CARNIVAL AS THE EMBLEM OF THE AGE

 Blurred lines between the holy and the profane

 Shift from the holy to the wordly
 Holiday and holy day
 Play is at the centre of comunal life
 Boundaries between learned and popular culture were permeable
 The comic helps exercise control over what is overpowering and fearsome
MYSTERY PLAYS

 Plays performed in the streets, markets

 Moved from ecclesistical settings to town centres
 Drew the community together, from all societal levels
 Religious truth combined with performance a festive atmosphere
 Inversion of hierarchies and possibility of critique
 The sacred and the profane co existed
BAHKTIN´S CARNIVALESQUE

 Behaviours that characterise popular culture

 Carnival: Time of excess before Lent
 ‘ Carnival is the people´s second life, organised on the basis of laughter’;
 Carnivals were the second life of the people, who for a time entered the
utopian realm of community, freedom, equality, and abundance.
 ‘Carnival asserts all the features of freedom, against restraint’
HUMOUR AND LAUGHTER IN MEDIEVAL TEXTS

 People's festive laughter is ambivalent: this laughter is ambivalent: it is gay, triumphant

and at the same time it is mocking . It is also directed at those who laugh. Laughter
degrades and materializes
 Forms of laughter: parodia sacra: parodies of prayers, of sermons;
 Parodies are festive: they deal with heroic deeds, epic heroes, and knightly tales
 There are various genres of mock rhetoric: carnivalesque debates, comic dialogues.
 Carnivalesque humor is also reflected in the fabliaux and in the peculiar comic lyrics of
vagrant scholars.
 It is also present in the use of profane and indecent expressions. The importance of
abusive language is essential to the understanding of the literature of the grotesque
THE GROTESQUE

 Link between humour and grotesque realism

 Clerical culture exalts the spirit; popular culture, the body.
 The essential aim of grotesque realism is degradation: lowering all that is high
(spiritual, abstract, ideal) to a material level
 Images of the human body with its food, drink, defecation, and sexual life, play a
predominant role.
 Images of the body are presented in an extremely exaggerated form.
THE BODILY ELEMENT: TOPOGRAPHY

 In grotesque realism, therefore, the bodily element is deeply positive. It is presented not in a private, egotistic
form, severed from the other spheres of life, but as something universal, representing all the people
 Upward" and "down ward“ have here an absolute and strictly topographical meaning. "Downward" is earth,
"upward" is heaven.
 The upper part is the face or the head and the lower part is the genital organs, the belly, and the buttocks.
 These absolute topographical connotations are used by grotesque realism, including medieval parody. Degradation
here means coming down to earth, the contact with earth as an element that swallows up and gives birth at the
same time.
MEDIEVAL GROTESQUE

 To degrade an object does not imply merely hurling it into the void of nonexistence,
but to hurl it down to the reproductive lower stratum, the zone in which conception
and a new birth take place.
 Grotesque realism knows no other lower level; it is the fruitful earth and the womb. It
is always conceiving.
 Medieval and Renaissance grotesque, filled with the spirit of carnival, liberates the
world from all that is dark and terrifying: it takes away all fears and is therefore
completely gay and bright
THE GROTESQUE BODY

 It is presented not in a private, egotistic form, severed from the other spheres of life,
but as something universal, representing all the people.
 All that is bodily becomes grandiose, exaggerated, immeasurable.
 Degradation here means coming down to earth, an element that swallows up and
gives birth at the same time.
 The leading themes of these images of bodily life are fertility, growth, and abundance.
BIBLIGRAPHY

 Bahktin, M. M. (1984). Rabelais and His World. Indiana University Press.

 Bisson, L. (1998). Chaucer and the Late Medieval world. (Chapters 5 and 6)